Core Concepts to Teach This Year 1. What important and enduring concepts are fundamental to the students I teach? 2. Why do these concepts matter? Why are they important? 3. Outside school, who cares about these topics? What is their relevance in different people's lives and in different parts of the world? 4. Select one or two of the most promising of these topics and think about real-life contexts to answer the following: What are the interdisciplinary connections? What other subjects might be incorporated? 5. As I begin to imagine working with these topics, how might I push past rote learning into analysis, evaluation, and creation? Incorporate Bloom's "rigor" verbs into my answer. 6. Imagine authentic ways students might engage in the project and the ways 21st-century skills might be addressed. Hint: The terms collaboration, digital tools, and information literacy should appear in my answer! 7. What aspects of these topics will interest my students? (A feature that seems superficial or tangential but fascinates students can give me entree into more essential matters, so I need to brainstorm as many as I can.) 8.What learning dispositions should you cultivate and ask my students to pay attention to?